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Last October we received an email from Brent Nummerdor, a Machining/Engineering teacher at the Muskegon Area Career Tech Center in Muskegon, Michigan, sharing with us a special project that he and his students were working on.

The special project was dubbed “Payton Project”, and the main intent was to redesign an IPEVO VZ-X Wireless Document Camera for Payton Hunter, a second grader at Oehrli Elementary School in Montague with mobile and visual disabilities.

For her classes, Payton needs to use the VZ-X document camera, connected wirelessly to an iPad, to see and to learn. Unfortunately, she is unable to reach up and reposition the document camera due to her impairments. So when Brent and his students were offered an opportunity to redesign VZ-X to give Payton more independence with it, they jumped right in, knowing how meaningful it would be.

To ensure that the final product would be fully customized to her needs, the students met with Payton throughout the process so that she could provide feedback on their design. They ended up doing some major tweaks to VZ-X that include replacing its arm with a longer one that they designed, and adding thrust bearings to its base. And these tweaks enable Payton to reach, adjust, rotate, and focus VZ-X all on her own, something she couldn’t do before!

Payton trying out her newly designed document camera with her iPad.Photo courtesy of Brent Nummerdor.

All in all, Payton was super excited about her new document camera, and we were totally honored that IPEVO’s VZ-X Wireless Document Camera was used for this project.

The “Payton Project” was also featured on 13 ON YOUR SIDE, click here for the story.

Payton and the entire “Payton Project” team posed for the camera.Photo courtesy of Brent Nummerdor.